The Grass Is Really No Greener Next Door

CHICAGO — The backyard barbecue, that homey symbol of suburban togetherness, occasions conflagrations emotional and literal in the terrific new play “Detroit,” by Lisa D’Amour, at the Steppenwolf Theater here. This scary-funny comedy, set in a nameless housing tract possibly, but not necessarily, outside the city of the title, speaks to the fractious, frightened American moment more perceptively than any play I’ve seen on a New York stage.

Laurie Metcalf, a Steppenwolf veteran, and Ian Barford, seen in the company’s smash “August: Osage County,” play solid, married members of the middle class whose upward mobility has recently been temporarily delayed. (Or so they nervously hope.) Mary still works as a paralegal in the city, but Ben has been laid off from his job as a loan officer. Although he jokingly calls himself a deadbeat, he’s trying to stay upbeat, cruising until the severance runs out as he works on a plan to start a Web-based financial-planning business.

The tidy backyard and nicely appointed house announce Mary and Ben’s belief in keeping up appearances — Mary makes ostentatious note of their haute-bourgeois food tastes — but there are little indications that decay and decline are just a few unpaid bills away. The cheap patio umbrella keeps malfunctioning, as does the screen door they haven’t gotten around to repairing.

Still, their home is a pristine palace compared with the weather-beaten wreck just steps away, where sheets hang in the windows, and weeds clot the grass. Mary and Ben were surprised to discover that the house was inhabited at all, which is why it has taken them so long to proffer a friendly barbecue invitation. (The precisely detailed set, by Kevin Depinet, establishes the houses almost as two wordless supporting characters.)

Ms. Metcalf’s tight, bright smile and Mary’s ever-present glass of red wine suggest that she’s not entirely at ease with her guests. Kenny (Kevin Anderson) and Sharon (Kate Arrington) are hardly the kind of folk with whom they would normally socialize, it’s clear. Kenny’s wardrobe consists entirely of jeans and grungy rock T-shirts, and he works in a warehouse. Sharon has streaks of magenta in her hair and answers phones for a living. (“It’s like customer service,” she says vaguely.) They casually let slip that they met in rehab just a few months ago and are renting the house from a relative.

Yet as Ms. D’Amour’s subtly trenchant writing makes plain, the Great Recession will probably make a lot stranger bedfellows than these mismatched pairs. Fine but precise distinctions between social strata are being blurred, if not obliterated, by the rising tide of economic distress. While in happier times Mary would surely disdain an association with the likes of Sharon and Kenny — and she cannot resist the occasional waspish comment on their lack of furniture — the two couples are soon finding strange succor in sharing their uncomfortably similar plights.

Mary proves to be the most emotionally brittle, unleashing a torrent of hysterical complaint to Sharon one night after a few vodkas too many. Mary’s needling hints about Ben’s spending his time at home more productively had sparked a fight, and Mary had nowhere else to turn, although she suddenly resorts to sneering put-downs when Sharon suggests that drinking may be part of the problem.

Ms. Metcalf’s almost unsettling transparency exposes the depths of fear and anger being held in check by Mary’s prim surface reserve. She almost seems to be vibrating like a tuning fork with pent-up anxiety. Mr. Barford’s Ben, meanwhile, is too self-consciously laid-back, clinging to the barbecue tongs as if they could keep the terrors of the uncertain future at bay.

Mr. Anderson, all scruffy puppy dog, and Ms. Arrington, who captures her character’s bruised innocence nicely, are equally fine as the sweet-natured slackers whose attempts to move onto the upward track are at best half-hearted.

“Mary, I open my eyes every morning, and all I want is a pipe to smoke,” Sharon confesses during one backyard tête-à-tête. “I’m supposed to set goals and maybe take night classes that will expand my horizons. And I guess that works, Mary, I guess so. But to be honest, I feel like the real opportunities are the ones that fall into your lap. Like winning the lottery or someone’s rich uncle needing a personal assistant.”

In the newly opportunity-free America of today that “Detroit” evokes with stinging humor, this downbeat philosophy can sound an awful lot like common sense. For all his talk about his aborning Web site and his determination to keep up the appearance of progress, Ben is almost equally fatalistic about the prospects of getting his life back in order among the growing ranks of the not very profitably self-employed.

“Running to Staples,” he moans, adding, “how many times a day can a man go to Staples! Anyway, I am totally fried by the time Mary comes home and kind of panicky because I feel like I didn’t get enough done.”

“Detroit” explores how attitudes and behaviors previously deemed unseemly or shameful — rage and irresponsibility and indulgence — can prove strangely seductive to people coming to realize that those old saws about bootstraps and the efficacy of responsibility and good hard work may no longer count for much. Despair and anger, and the pathologies that attend them, could soon be spreading like crabgrass in the suburban landscape, just as likely to spring up in the prettified neighborhoods as in the scruffy.

Ms. D’Amour, whose background is mostly in experimental theater, is occasionally guilty of overstatement or inconsistency. Mary’s brand-name-dropping makes her a little too easy to snicker at, and Sharon’s intelligence level and frame of reference get a little blurry. Her dubious inference that Ben is British occasions a running gag that doesn’t make much sense. The play’s last scene, a coda that introduces a new character, could use some sharpening. (It seems inspired by Tracy Letts’s opening scene in “August,” a play that has clearly been an influence on Ms. D’Amour.)

But “Detroit” is a powerful, funny play about the fraying of American culture under the stress of economic uncertainty, and it betokens a potentially important new voice.

Although characters’ recounting of their dreams is a somewhat worn device, it is entirely suitable here. “Detroit,” which has been directed with keen insight by Austin Pendleton, climaxes in a wild, impromptu dream sequence that is in fact actually taking place, as the couples party with a fervor that is both hilarious in its playful anarchy and disturbing in its intimations of the primal forces that hopelessness can unleash. The comfy backyard, once a sunny symbol of the American dream achieved, has become the realm of nightmares from which it is impossible to awaken.